The fact that bad trades and unstable market bubbles happen doesn't negate the value of trade. People do stupid things sometimes. Sometimes large groups of people do stupid things..

The stimulation for dealing with a problem like a need for new sources of energy is the increase in cost of the old sources. You appear to think it would be better to have a top down directed system where people are told what to produce based on your determination of the relative value, but I think it works better when people make their own decisions based on their perception of value (google "invisible hand") If people want trinkets more than fuel, they should buy trinkets. If you want fuel more than trinkets, spend your money on fuel - that demand will stimulate production.

You are completely ignoring the time and capital investment required to make production facilities. This is known as "barrier to entry" and prevents the rapid commoditization of many products. You are also assuming an asymptotic endpoint of zero-margin production while discounting the wealth that can be accumulated before that endpoint is reached. My wealth point has nothing to do with trade - it was to address your statement

  "Wealth comes from two places and two places only: new natural resource discoveries and improvements in efficiency (i.e. scientific, technological and business process discoveries)."

Which totally discounts work, skill and time. Piano tuners don't have any discoveries, or consume natural resources, yet they create wealth by the hour. The service economy runs almost entirely outside of your overly narrow wealth creation definition. Since it is the largest component to the US GDP, I think you've missed something important and should rethink it.

Your island example is bad. Shirts are valueless (or of equivalent value) in this context, so trading them doesn't create wealth.

Now if one half of the island had bird nests full of eggs, and the other had water, two people on the respective halves of your island could trade and both would have more wealth because on the bird side, plentiful food is worth LESS than the scant water and on the water side abundant water is worth LESS than the scarce eggs. Then trading is good for both parties, they both have more of what they most value than before. The sum of value across the island is higher, and thus there is more wealth.

If you don't like a resource example, one person could know how to weave hats and build boat hulls and the other could know how to weave nets and sails. Trade creates more wealth. This is extremely basic economic theory.

You are wrong about where wealth comes from. At the end of the day every manufacturing plant turns steel/glass/wire and plastic into a bunch of products worth more than the inputs. That directly creates wealth and it doesn't have anything to do with natural resource discoveries or improvements in efficiency. This is true at the craftsman level as well- working a bunch of reeds into a useful basket directly creates wealth - the basket is worth more than the reeds.

Your assertion is not supported by the data.
Promise hospital is the only ER closed in san diego in the last 10 years. Three (20%) closed in the last 20 years. That is just facilities though, the total number of ER beds has increased.

Here's a reference so you can get educated and avoid public misstatements about this topic:
http://www.fox5sandiego.com/news/kswb-hospital-closure-study-2011,0,4855566.story

The reason people can't get to an ER on time is because the city has decided to spend its money on retirement benefits, major league ball parks, and redevelopment rather than on fire stations or ambulances. That has nothing whatsoever to do with illegal aliens.

I agree that EMTALA is unfair and that hospital rate setting for the uninsured is also unfair but don't agree those two things are connected. I do think if people were left in the street to die because they were poor and uninsured we'd be a lesser nation. I think it would be more fair if the government explicitly acted as a single-payer insurer to cover emergency treatment and people were taxed to cover the expense. The current system is just stupid.

Unless you are part of the heretical "uncooked" schism, he's clearly pulling...

It's distorted in three ways

1) it's factually incorrect - the plan called for paying doctors for their time spent consulting about end-of-life plans with their patients.

2) it implies that there aren't already existing panels of bureaucrats deciding who gets what treatment paid for operating currently in every private insurance company, which affects anyone not paying for their healthcare out of pocket

3) it implies that resource allocation made by experts is inherently a bad thing. Every transplant organization has a board which determines who is or is not eligible for transplants. They're usually doctors, but they are certainly acting in a bureaucratic capacity making life or death decisions. I think this is a good thing, so that old alcoholic smokers don't get heart, liver and lung transplants ahead of people more likely to treat the new organs well.

No. You need to pay to license the rights you need. It will be a different license, and may or may not be less restrictive than the GPL.

??? That's precisely a requirement for commercial software. You don't have integration and redistribution rights under copyright law without a license to do it. You must pay to license the rights you need. If you are arguing that most commercial licenses include that right, I disagree and would assert the opposite is in fact the case.

Usually less free than a commercial license? I'm curious about your definition of less.

You can copy GPL software to any and all machines you want without restrictions. (commercial software doesn't usually let you do that)
You can give or sell GPL software to anyone, as long as you provide them the source code. (commercial software doesn't usually allow that)
You can modify it and use it anywhere (commercial software doesn't usually allow that)
You can incorporate it into your own code, provided that you license your code as GPL (commercial software doesn't usually allow that)

You can pay for the rights to do all of these things with commercial software, subject to the copyright holders predilection for selling those rights.

The only thing you cannot do is incorporate GPL software into your own NON-GPL code without paying the copyright holder for those additional rights, subject to their willingness to license those rights, but you can't do that with commercial software either.

As I see it you are never more restricted by the GPL than a commercial license. There exist commercial licenses that allow unlimited use and distribution and modification and distribution of the modified code, but they are extremely rare big $$$$ licenses - Sun's license for Unix and Microsofts license for SQL Server are good examples.

If you are a developer and want to sell binary only copies of a modified version of something, then you may be better off starting from something that isn't GPL licensed. But that doesn't make it more free, just better suited to your particular purposes, and describing it as more free is inaccurate. It is simply more convenient to license the particular rights you are interested in. A software USER always has more freedom under the GPL than a commercial license because the only right constrained by the GPL is one that does not impact them, and commercial software nearly always constrains usage rights in some way. Users can even legally use GPL'd software without agreeing to the license!

I've been running DD-WRT on a linksys WRT 320N for a while now without issues. I'm just using it as a bridge, so I haven't really stressed it but it has dual band antennas (internal unfortunately) and gig-e ports.

Here's a three generation feeding study that showed no adverse affect for rats fed Bt producing GMO corn, but did detect minor biochemical changes. I just skimmed it, so it may not be perfect, but it is well written and doesn't reek of significance inflation and data mining for a desired outcome like the cited study does. #2 hit on google for "Bt Rat Feeding Studies" so there is no reason for the authors not to have cited it except that it contradicts their conclusions with better data.

http://www.somloquesembrem.org/img_editor/file/Kilic&Akay08BtMaizeFeedingStudy.pdf

Aysun Kilic, M. Turan Akay, A three generation study with genetically modified Bt corn in rats: Biochemical and histopathological investigation, Food and Chemical Toxicology, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 1164-1170, ISSN 0278-6915, DOI: 10.1016/j.fct.2007.11.016.
Keywords: Transgenic Bt corn; Three generation study; Histopathology; Biochemical analysis; Wistar albino rat

Maybe you better read it again - Hydro is only lowest when you don't have to build a dam. There are a few major installations like this, but there are very few appropriate sites for it. Even some of the so-called run of river installations include dams, which would put them in the higher-carbon bracket.

> This is not an epidemic or pandemic.

Wrong. It is a global pandemic. Here's the WHO pandemic flu update (it's update 71 in case you missed the first 70 of them):
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_10_23/en/index.html

>> The Chinese leadership is much, much smarter than the American populace.

you don't set a very high bar. Americans as a group are incredibly willfully ignorant and shortsighted. Electing a willfully ignorant president, twice, is but one example. Pulling children out of PUBLIC schools so they don't get brainwashed by a speech made by the President of the United States is another. Not building nuclear power plants due to irrational fear of radiation is another. Not recognizing that taxes and spending actually have to balance in the long term. Not insisting politicians deal with the structural imbalances of Medicare and Social Security early to minimize the pain.

There are many more examples...

Rabbits eat their poop as part of their digestive process, rather than chewing their cud. If you want to call that ok, go right ahead. Evolutionarily you are correct, they do quite well, but lets not overstate how efficient they are at digesting - everything gets run through twice.

You're wrong. Road damage is correllated to the fourth power of the total axle weight.
This is a very well studied area, both theoretically and empirically, so guessing isn't necessary.
Here's one reference, googling will quickly find others. Binging might too.

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JFE/bin/get6.cgi?directory=July99/&filename=martin.html

I like how it's done in keyPass - be default all passwords are masked, but you can use a button adjacent to the password box to turn off masking.

I think 8-10 character passwords should be masked to eliminate shoulder surfing issues, but who was the idiot in the Microsoft networking UI team that thought that WPA keys were passwords and decided they needed to be masked? That's just nonsense. Encryption keys are not passwords. They should be long and shoulder surfing is not an issue because you only enter them once. Every time I connect to a wireless network with windows I curse that idiot... I'm sure I'm not the only one.